Conservative Shakes Up Canadian Campaign

November 23, 2000|By James Brooke, New York Times News Service.

TORONTO — Riding out of the west on a platform of tax cuts and born-again social conservatism, a smooth-talking college dropout-turned-politician named Stockwell Day is giving Canadian politics its biggest shake-up in years.

Even though Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his Liberal Party are likely to extend their seven-year rule in the national election on Monday, it was Day and his new Canadian Alliance that precipitated the vote and have forced Chretien to tack uncharacteristically hard to the right.

In the process, Day has challenged some of the cornerstones of Canada's identity, including the generous social spending that has saddled Canadians with one of the world's highest tax rates.

One month after Day arrived in Parliament this fall, Chretien's government suddenly announced the biggest tax cut in Canadian history. With Day having lost his main issue, Chretien then called a snap election, cutting short his second five-year term to 31/2 years.

Although Canadians tell pollsters they do not want an election, the 66-year-old prime minister does not want to wait a year to allow his 50-year-old rival to spread his message. On the social side, Day, an evangelical Christian, wants to show the world that Canada is not Scandinavia West. On the fiscal side, Day, a former Alberta treasury minister who instituted a flat income tax for his province, preaches that by cutting taxes Canada can reverse its southward-flowing brain drain.

"The whining sound you hear is the sound of U-haul trailers loading up and leaving the country because of high taxation," Day told an Alliance rally in a Toronto suburb. Referring to this loss of ambitious, well-educated Canadians, he said, "Patriotism is wonderful, but if you can no longer afford it, you'll say, `I'll put my flag in my pocket and put it on the wall of my new house in Denver and sing "O Canada" there."'

In Ontario, the nation's economic powerhouse, people increasingly say they oppose Canadian income tax rates, which often total 50 percent.

"It's a shame that Canada leads the G-7 in taxes," said Monica Lozneanu, a 19-year-old television production assistant here, referring to the group of major Western countries and Japan. "Stockwell Day looks like a leader. I think a lot of my friends will vote for him."

For party organizers, the conversion by people like Lozneanu to the candidacy of Day's Canadian Alliance is crucial for the new party to break out of its western birthplace and establish an electoral beachhead in Ontario, home to one-third of Canadian voters.

"It is as if you rolled New York and California into one state," said Rod Love, Day's strategist from Alberta, of Ontario's importance. Arguing that conservative voters dominate in suburban Toronto and interior Ontario, Love said of the production assistant's politics: "It's like [President Richard] Nixon's silent majority. The people who obey the law, who pay taxes will vote Stockwell Day."

Arguing that Canadians pay 25 percent more taxes than Americans, Day plans to spend his last week campaigning here in Ontario, a province that has given him large and enthusiastic crowds.

Polls indicate that Day's drive to unite the right may fall short of its goal of depriving Chretien of a third consecutive majority government. In the last election, in 1997, Chretien won a slim 51 percent majority of parliamentary seats with only 38.5 percent of the popular vote, one of the lowest winning totals in Canadian history. He won the majority largely because, in a five-way race, the conservative vote split in Ontario between two right-wing parties, the Progressive Conservatives and the Reformers, the Western-based predecessors of the Alliance.

While polls indicate that Day is the favored candidate among Canadian men outside of Quebec, he lags among women who are uneasy about his past stands on abortion, gun control, gay rights and the death penalty. During the campaign, which is restricted to 36 days, Day has avoided controversial stands on social issues, which have been cut from his party's platform. He has been so smooth that Joe Clark, leader of the rival Progressive Conservatives, derided him in a debate as a "television game-show host."

Button-down eastern Canadians also feel uncomfortable with Day's "U.S.-style" fondness for the campaign photo opportunity. A trim man who tries to exercise one hour a day, Day has been photographed chopping wood, in-line skating, kick boxing, and, dressed in a wet suit, zooming across a lake in a personal watercraft.

These midlife athletics are an extension of a knockabout youth, part Captain Canada, part Jack London.

Day has lived in half of Canada's 10 provinces as well as in the Arctic territories. The son of a chain store manger, he spent his childhood in Ottawa, where he learned early political lessons, and in Montreal, where he learned serviceable French, a virtual requirement for federal office in a country where nearly one-quarter of the population speaks French.